Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

If you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Just rebooted from Karmic into Lucid and the fan kicked in during bootup. The only major difference between the two is that I'm using fglrx in Karmic and in Lucid it's xserver-xorg-video-radeon which I'm convinced is the problem

I've done the mainline test: I used the latest linux-image-2.6.34-999-generic_2.6.34-999.201004132352_amd64.deb

The temperature (TZ02) still rises fast and the fan comes on still.

(By the way, in case it affects it: the linux-headers-2.6.34-999... package would not install because of unmet dependencies. But I can confirm that I did the test using the new kernel because I booted into it and checked with uname -a.)

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

On 21/04/10 02:21, Chase Douglas wrote:
> Please test with the 2.6.32-21 kernel. There were some relevant changes
> from -19 to -20 and then to -21 in the embedded controller code that
> controls the fans.
>
> Thanks
>
>
Hi Chase

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Rich <email address hidden> wrote:
> On 21/04/10 02:21, Chase Douglas wrote:
>>
>> Please test with the 2.6.32-21 kernel. There were some relevant changes
>> from -19 to -20 and then to -21 in the embedded controller code that
>> controls the fans.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>>
>
> Hi Chase
>
> Where can I get that kernel? It's not listed at
> http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

It's the latest Ubuntu kernel. When you run software update it should
download and install it for you.

Update - I have upgraded to 2.6.32-21 and the laptop was still running hot by the time it booted up. However I noticed under 'Hardware Drivers' that fglrx has now been made available. I have installed it and the results are significantly better. The only disadvantage is that Plymouth runs in 800 x 600 instead of my native 1366 x 768 but I'll live with that and at least my 6 year-old wont suffer burns to her lap now.

Think I broke my chance of fglrx - I upgraded to beta 2 at the time there were loads of dependency ("diversion") problems and it took a lot of hacking to get the thing to go away so that apt would even run. Now jockey doesn't even show it as available. :-/

Anyway, that's off-topic but I'm quite excited by the idea that there could be a open source driver that works well; I think this bug is still important, and I really appreciate that it's been marked as highly important. :-)

I would like to add that I see the exact same problem on an HP TX2000 which also has the Radeon HD3200 graphics. The fan runs constantly and the battery life is terrible compared to karmic. I am about to try switching to the commercial driver, but agree with the posts above...the OS driver is better! However, I cannot live with this battery life....

I would like to report that my Dell Latitude D620 with Intel 945GM graphics has been running very warm since my upgrade to Lucid. In my case it seems like the system fan is not coming on as frequently as it used to in Karmic.

I'm seeing the opposite. Using the open source driver for ATI cards the laptop gets hot straight away and the fan kicks in. Using fglrx (the proprietary driver) I have no trouble at all apart from Plymouth being at a very low resolution. I wonder if we have two separate problems here, one affecting those with ATI and the other affecting those with Intel graphics chips

As it's a kernel module, you're unlikely to see anything in 10.04 unless anything is backported which as a long term support release is disappointing. So it will probably be in Maverick (of course Fedora 13 or OpenSuse 11.3 may include newer, better drivers in the meantime)

I have this problem and it seems it still isn´t fixed!
My laptop gets very hot and the battery time is very low, also the fans are full time running. Lol it´s almost like my laptop gonna explode.
I never had this problem wit karmic my laptop was cool and quite.
I hope it can be fixed!
Sorry for my bad English!

Please don't change the bug status without knowing the impact. In changing the status back to new, you are telling the developers there is not enough information for anyone to work on this issue. In the case of this bug, there is enough for a developer to look at the issue and begin working to resolve it.

The issue originally reported appears to be an ATI Graphics specific issue, likely triggered by the new KMS drivers being less sensitive to power consumption on the graphics side and the fans for the GPU are coming on. The other issues specifically those with Intel graphics or those related to upgrades are highly likley different issues. The complexity in separating issues of this nature makes it much more sensible to file an individual bug with all of your symptoms and system information in one place. This allows the triagers and developers to more readily examine the information and make a determination if your issue is one and the same as another and then duplicate the bugs if appropriate. We would rather have too many bugs than not enough.

To this end, if you are not the original reporter of this bug we would appreciate you following the instructions on the page below, which will request you file a new bug and help you gather the right information:

I tried that, it says "No proprietary drivers are in use on this system." I'm not sure what to do, but my computer overheated yesterday and now i need the motherboard replaced so i would like to figure this out.

I had the very problem specified in this bug, with carmic and until recently with and updated lucid. Battery life was just half of the one in Windows, and the laptop got really hot, T0 and T1 reported by acpi were around 55 and 61 C.
I use a lenovo t 500 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 3650. Driver initially was the free Radeon.

Installing and employing the up to date proprietary fglrx 2:8.723.1-0ubuntu4 (lucid updates) 2:8.723.1-0ubuntu3 (lucid) packages via the dpkg resolved my temperature problem. The temp is now down to about 41 - 43 C. And battery lifetime is even better than in Windows :-)

Performance is quite similar, though I still have to verify that. First Impression is nevertheless good.

So maybe it works for some of you guys. The hints here helped me a lot. Thank you.

[Update to the post above] on the proprietary drivers: well the 3D support is really not that good, and the makes the machine kind of slow when it reacts to new windows or switching between applications. On top of that the driver does not work properly with docking stations and additional monitors. Always have to set the right resolution after starting. But I think that would be another bug than this one.

[HP 6540b, Mobility RADEON 4500, 2.6.32-24-generic-pae]
I can confirm that the proprietary driver helps. BUT when I run an application accessing opengl (e.g. fgl_glxgears) the problem is back. The temperature jumps to 85 C from 60 C and fan runs on full speed. The laptop turns off after a while.

obviously, there was never any real intention of canonical to help us in this case.
The case was openend in April, now we have September, it looks like, that they just waited until 10.10 has been released.

obviously the 10.10beta did not fix this problem
i tried this version and then build a 2.6.35.5 kernel (newer then what with the beta, with lfs tutorial instruction) myself
and the fan is running constantly again (80% of the time) without fglrx binary

sorry i cannot give out the attachment
for the system will burning down and restart in a few minutes without the ATI proprietary driver

hope for resolving so i can sget my pretty console with 1366x768 again (now, shit 800x600)

While 10.10 is a massive improvement in terms of heat with the ATI driver, it's still nowhere near the levels seen with the proprietary driver. Only thing with the proprietary driver is that you don't get Plymouth looking pretty. Interesting that fglrx became available in hardware drivers the other day.

Maybe your video card has been deprecated by ATI-AMD, i got that it has
stopped supporting for some old cards, which is blamed by many people.
You can go downgrade or compile an older kernel yourself.
(Go ati.amd.com to see which is the oldest version of fglrx still
supported and compile a corresponding kernel.)

PS. my card is ATI Radeon HD4570

On Mon, 2010-09-27 at 21:47 +0000, bartee wrote:
> I don't see any proprietary drivers appear on my laptop. (Thinkpad T60,
> ATI Mobility Radeon X1300). No fglrx option for for us I suppose: just
> go back to 8.04/9.10?
>
> I have to say that the Xorg PPA edgers driver does a better job (not
> great but better) especially with the flag dynpm=1 set in
> /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf
>
> Fan is still crazy fast and temperatures (while playing video) reaches a
> max of 70C but generally is between 50-60C (quite high but not
> dangerously so).
>
> Any updates from folks at Canonical??
>

--
Sincerely,
Chen Chen (LunarShaddow) <email address hidden>

Before reading this document, please verify the correctness and
completeness of the digital signature first.

Thanks Chen Chen. But I really don't wish to downgrade. And yes, from my previous post, ATI-AMD has deprecated the ATI Mobility Radeon X1300; So no fglrx option for my card. Hence the urgency to fix this issue.

This article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_power&num=1 published in March of last year is happy with the open source driver on power management. Considers it comparable (or better) to fglrx. And it was tested in the same laptop (Thinkpad T60) that I have. Unfortunately that progress seems to have been stunted with 10.04. :(

Has occurred in both 10.04 and 10.10, the only thing open could be a single web browser window and a text editor, and the heat, fan speed, battery life is similar to if a modern 3D video game was open in windows7.

after upgrading to 10.10 and switching back to the opensource driver nothing changed, temp still > 70° and fan was always running.
I know that the new kernel 2.6.35.x has some radeon specific powersaving features implemented, after searching a bit I've found the relevant information. It seems that the default powerprofile is the high one.
It is possible to override this, check the power method:
cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
=> should be profile
echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
=> enables auto profile switching, low on bat, high on AC
now check the GPU frequ:
cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 550000 kHz
current engine clock: 219370 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 249750 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16

Apparently that folder does not allow files to be created in it even as root. I did notice that there seems to be a folder named 'power' in there and some files in it. Perhaps we're not meant to directly touch these but configure it from somewhere else? Might be bleeding edge work-in-progress.. Any ideas or links for updates?

Nevermind, I had disabled KMS. Once I enabled it (radeon.modeset = 1), I see radeon_pm_info and everything else. GPU Temperature at 62C and Fan at 3287 RPM after setting power_method profile/auto as mentioned earlier. Will monitor and provide feedback..

I've been struggling with this issue since my upgrade to 10.4. I've an HP 8530p with ATI RadeonHD 3650, Ubuntu 64 bit.

Today I did the following and things seem to get better:
- Purged all the fglrx packages from Catalyst 10.10
- Installed Catalyst 10.11 (fglrx version 8.791)
- aticonfig --initial -f
- aticonfig --acpi-services=off
- from the Catalyst Control Center the PowerPlay option is enabled

While Googling around to solve this problem with my Lenovo x100e, I stumbled into some random links about high pitch noise from the computer.

I think the missing sound could relate to this issue. In Windows I hear the high pitch regulator noise and the battery life span is much higher. And I recollect hearing the same sound with some previous version of Ubuntu. Those Ubuntu versions felt like being more power conservative.

I'm so sorry that I don't think this bug would be fixed until the kernel upstream updated the radeon-related code...
I've tried the latest kernel in my Gentoo dist (2.6.36-r5 I think), but no related problem improved...

My motherboard recently 'died' and I can't discount the possibility that it may have been damaged due to this bug. It's disappointing that the bug has been de-assigned, are we to assume from that that the kernel team don't think there's a problem?

Due to what it would have cost to repair I have now purchased a new laptop and have avoided anything with ATI graphics (which these days is pretty much anything with an AMD CPU) as I don't want to go through all this again

This has a very high chance of DAMAGING HARDWARE and so should be given the highest possible priority.

My Dell Studio 1555 runs about 30 degrees hotter while idle using the opensource radeon driver then when using the FLGRX driver. If I actually use my laptop (playing games etc) the temperature goes straight into very unsafe territory .

The default ubuntu configuration for ATI Mobility Radeon cards is most likely permanently damaging peoples computers. I can't think of something higher priority then this (apart from it killing small children).

It should be noted that setting the “low” profile (as suggested by “echo low | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile”) is not guaranteed to actually work at all. There are a large number of cards which cannot drive a monitor correctly with the lowest clock settings. “medium” should be regarded as the lowest profile that's certain to work.

Same here, Dell Studio XPS 16, HD Radeon 5670: Under 11.10 open source driver works very well except for extremely high temperature and constant, unbearable fan noise. I used the proprietary driver for six months with 11.04, with a lot of problems and tried to use it again this time around, but trying to get Catalyst working with an external monitor broke Unity thoroughly and I was forced to reinstall the entire thing.

I have a Dell Studio XPS 1645 with Core i7 720QM and Ati Radeon HD4670 graphics. I tried installing 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 10.04.4. 11.04. 11.10. 12.04 but almost same temperatures and fan state in all.

shinyblue, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

If reproducible, could you also please test the latest upstream kernel available (not the daily folder) following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds ? It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please comment on which kernel version specifically you tested. If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tags:
kernel-fixed-upstream
kernel-fixed-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

where VERSION-NUMBER is the version number of the kernel you tested. For example:
kernel-fixed-upstream-v3.13-rc6

This can be done by clicking on the yellow circle with a black pencil icon next to the word Tags located at the bottom of the bug description. As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the following tags:
kernel-bug-exists-upstream
kernel-bug-exists-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug's Status as Confirmed. Please let us know your results. Thank you for your understanding.